Putin and Xi About to Lose Partner in Crime
Iran regime's days are numbered but the West is still asleep
It is happening.
While I’m writing these lines, Israel has established air superiority over Tehran, striking Iran’s key facilities, including nuclear sites and the public broadcaster, and eyeing the complete collapse of the mullahs.
The success of their operation “Rising Lion,” launched Friday, is so high that the Wall Street Journal has reported that Iran requested its partners to tell Jerusalem that it’s ready to negotiate.
Too late.
Israel doesn’t want to negotiate.
On the contrary, Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu reiterated that he doesn’t rule out the assassination of Iran’s “Supreme Leader” Ali Khamenei in order to put an end to a decades-long regime whose track record ranges from disgusting to very disgusting.
In response to the situation, the Telegraph has published a piece stating that Putin and Xi are panicking over Iran and rightly so. It is no coincidence that Putin called up Trump on Saturday to offer his “mediating” services between Iran and Israel. Yes, it’s deeply cynical given what he’s doing in Ukraine and has trolling vibes to it, but it’s also an attempt to somehow save the member of the Axis of Evil that Iran belongs to alongside Russia, China, and North Korea.
Iran regime’s defeat would mean more than just an end to the perennial ambition of the mullahs to “wipe Zionists off the map”, which neither Moscow nor Beijing has that much problem with, disrupt weapon supplies to Russia, or further humiliate Putin after Assad’s fall.
It would undermine the Axis of Evil’s chief cause of waging war against the West, which permanently replaced the era of cooperation, however fragile and tenuous.
That era, which lasted roughly between the 1990s and 2000s, was largely dictated by the need to collaborate with the West for pragmatic reasons and restore collapsed Soviet and satellite economies through trade.
Take the so-called Chinese miracle, which has virtually nothing miraculous to it. On the contrary, it’s what Marx and Engels would describe as “exploitation of the proletariat,” an economic model that rests on providing a cheap labor force and fully contradicts Communism per se.
Yet it’s exactly this model that helped Beijing finally make money from Western consumers and build up wealth in the once-destitute country.
Likewise, Putin’s Russia rose from the ashes not because it created something unique but simply because it conceived a good fossil fuel trading model in the 2000s. The high oil prices at the time helped out his rule even more.
But those days are over.
Not in the sense of severing trade ties, no.
For all the absurdity, the EU continues to be one of the chief sponsors of Russia’s war against Ukraine, and it appears that nothing is able to change that. In fact, Europe is due to spend over €20 billion buying oil, gas, coal, and uranium from Russia in 2025.
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I don’t believe in coincidences. And if you’re like me, here’s some food for thought.
But in the sense of ideological calmness, if you will, where two different mindsets — open and closed societies —simply co-exist and not enter the full hostility mode like they do now.
The problem is that the West, and Europe in particular, appears to still not fully understand this. Most politicians prefer to view what’s going on as some scattered isolated tension rather than take it for what it is.
Some even managed to criticize Israel for attacking Iran and “escalating tensions,” preferring to just sit and watch Islamic radicals develop a nuclear bomb under the pretense of futile negotiations.
And yet the reality is such that few countries are willing to actually act and, yes, spill blood while fighting off the Axis of Evil.
While Ukraine is resisting Russia, which made it crystal clear and in the most explicit terms possible that it wants to restore all of its sphere of influence in the former Soviet bloc and beyond, Israel is diligently eliminating the threat, facing Iran’s nocturnal missile retaliations.
Both are also destroying Shahed production sites in Iran and Russia, showing how deeply these conflicts are intertwined in reality and the need to chop off this malicious gorgon’s head one by one.
Taiwan may soon join us in this fight.
But the question is, when will all others finally wake up?
And if at all?
The fact that Europe still buys stuff such as oil and gas doesn't mean they're not serious. It only means that it takes time to disassemble from Russia.
Also, the prices are capped. It costs Putin more money to get the goodies out of the ground than he makes by selling them to the Europeans.
If Putin had any sense, he'd stop supplying on his end. It would be cheaper if he stopped drilling while continuing to pay the people who do the drilling...
This is a repeat of WSJ